[Ardour-Users] ardour & "phoning home"

[Henry W. Peters]

On 08/05/2010 04:39 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
> i recently committed some changes to ardour3 that will enable it to
> "phone home" (contact ardour.org) as it starts up. i wanted to alert
> existing users to this, since it will likely be added to ardour 2.X as
> well.
>
> Why am I adding this to Ardour?
> --------------------------------------
> * better data on how much Ardour is actually used
> * better idea of the balance between OS X and Linux platforms
> * a way to alert users that new versions are available
>
>
> How does it work? What does it do? Etc.
> ------------------------------------------------
> * the phone home is implemented via an HTTP POST request to a URL at ardour.org
> * it will execute once per instance of ardour, asynchronously (it will
> not block startup in any way)
> * the phone home will not be enabled in debug builds (i assume there
> is mostly testing going on, not real work)
> * the phone home will be enabled by default. users or distro package
> builders could choose to disable it
> * the phone home will pass the following pieces of information to ardour.org:
>
>                 * the ardour version
>                 * the output of uname -srm
>
> * if ardour ever gets a "watermark" system (not planned at this time),
> it will also pass the watermark along if such a watermark exists
> * no personal information will be transmitted
> * no machine-based information will be transmitted, but the IP address
> will be recorded on ardour.org
> * if a single file exists (e.g. ~/.config/ardour3/.offthehook ?) then
> no phone home will be initiated
> * no phone home will be initiated if the machine appears to have no
> functioning network interface
> * there *MAY* be a GUI-accessible way to disable the phone-home mechanism
>
> What If I Don't Like it?
> ------------------------
> You will have several choices:
>    * compile with --phone-home=no
>    * create ~/.config/ardour3/.offthehook or ~/.ardour2/.offthehook or
> whatever we decide to call the file(s)
>    * use ardour on an offline machine
>    * edit it out of the code (its just 1 line)
>    * if I add the GUI-accessible method, use that to disable the mechanism
>
> If anyone has any serious objections to the scheme I'm describing that
> are not addressed in the last section, please speak up. I certainly
> don't want to irritate people with this scheme,  but instead want to
> be able to better understand the user-base and alert ardour users who
> don't watch the website or mailing lists about new releases. We still
> have people trying to download Ardour 0.99 (about 50 per month!) and
> other evidence suggests that a lot of people simply don't upgrade.
> This in turn harms them, and blocks us from getting fixes and
> improvements out to users who can benefit from them.
> ______________________________________________
Paul,

So is this basically a scheme somewhat like some other programs use to 
notify of an available update? & since compliance would be almost 
everything... a certain amount of flexibility in options to participate 
(or not) might actually help in this regard?

If so, why not add a voluntary request option (if possible), & that 
might also include the other use the other data as well (or something 
like this)?

Henry